The present invention relates generally to adaptive control of cutting operations on CNC operated machine tools. More specifically, the present invention relates to adaptively controlling the volumetric removal of material during the machining process.
Production requires that the time to produce parts must be minimized to increase production throughput. The throughput of the machine is affected by time during the process and any interruptions that occur during the machining process. Therefore, improving the rate at which material is removed and minimizing process interruptions due to premature tool wear or failure can decrease the machining time. Adaptive control has been used in the prior art to accomplish these functions, but the process has been difficult to set up and operate.
Among the difficulties in operating the adaptive control with computer numerical control (CNC) resources is that activation has been manual in nature. Attempts in the prior art to automate the activation of the adaptive control function has been clumsy in that temporal or geometric information must be known, and therefore detailed knowledge of the process must be known for activation.
The basic function of any CNC machine is automatic, precise and consistent motion control. All forms of CNC equipment have two or more directions of motion called axes. These axes can be precisely and automatically positioned along their lengths of travel. The most common axes types are linear and rotary. In general, the motion type, the axes to move, the amount of motion, and the feed rate are programmable with almost all CNC machine tools.
Almost all current CNC controls use a word address format for programming. By this, it is meant that the CNC program is made up of sentence-like commands. Each command is made up of CNC words. Each CNC word has a letter address and a numerical value. The G and M letter addresses allow special functions to be designated. The G preparatory function is commonly used to set modes. The M miscellaneous function is typically used as a programmable switch (e.g., spindle on/off).